Technical Program Manager, Perception Data

About Zipline

Do you want to change the world? Zipline is on a mission to transform the way goods move. Our aim is to solve the world’s most urgent and complex access challenges by building, manufacturing and operating the first instant delivery and logistics system that serves all humans equally, wherever they are. From powering Rwanda’s national blood delivery network and Ghana’s COVID-19 vaccine distribution, to providing on-demand home delivery for Walmart, to enabling healthcare providers to bring care directly to U.S. homes, we are transforming the way things move for businesses, governments and consumers. The technology is complex but the idea is simple: a teleportation service that delivers what you need, when you need it. Through our technology that includes robotics and autonomy, we are decarbonizing delivery, decreasing road congestion, and reducing fossil fuel consumption and air pollution, while providing equitable access to billions of people and building a more resilient global supply chain.   Join Zipline and help us to make good on our promise to build an equitable and more resilient global supply chain for billions of people.

About You and The Role  

Zipline is at the forefront of a logistics revolution, using autonomous aircraft to deliver just-in-time, life-saving medical supplies on multiple continents, 7 days a week. We have completed over 200,000 deliveries; it took over 4 years to reach the first 100,000 deliveries. It took 8 months to reach the last 100,000 deliveries. Do you want to be a part of reaching 1 million life-saving deliveries in the next 2 years? 

We believe access to medical care should not depend on your GPS coordinates. In service of our mission to operate at global scale, we’re growing our perception capabilities to expand quickly and safely into new products and locations, with the ultimate goal of delivering essential packages right to your doorstep. We are looking for a passionate and creative program manager to join Zipline’s Perception Data team to level up the quality and throughput of Zipline’s Perception data collection and annotation operations to enable the development of key autonomy capabilities on our Zips. The Perception Data team at Zipline is responsible for building high quality ML datasets at scale, used to train ML models that power Ziplines perception centric capabilities on its vehicles.

What You'll Do  

• In this role your ultimate goal is delivering high-quality data (including annotated data) to the different modeling teams.
• You'll be responsible for overseeing the entire pipeline that supports data collection, curation, annotation, QA/QC and ingestion process for a specific perception capability but also scale to other capabilities from concept to completion, and ensure that the data delivered to the autonomy modeling teams meets Zipline’s rigorous quality standards in a timely manner.
• Understand the strategic goals and requirements for the perception capability by interacting with the autonomy engineering leaders to help prioritize engineering tasks.
• Prioritize and schedule data collection across multiple teams in different timezones and annotation projects to align with organizational goals and timelines
• Work closely with engineering to ensure that the data collection tools meet Zipline's standards for reliability and document requirements for improvement.
• Establish data collection & annotation guidelines and training material, as well as determine a range for time per task; calibrate the task with the vendor or internal data collection/annotation team and track and report on quantities and quality delivered
• Drive budget planning for data annotation and acquisition efforts and communicate with Finance
• Coordinate with vendors to establish long-term partnerships and ensure proper & accurate invoicing.
• Work closely with privacy, legal, procurement, and security.
• Develop and continuously monitor program performance metrics, identify areas for improvement, and proactively implement necessary corrective measures
• Define the necessary tooling for collection, curation, and annotation tasks, and work with engineering to develop new plugins, templates, or tools to support R&D requirements
• Serve as an interface for feedback and questions from annotators back to the modeling engineers

What You'll Bring 

• Excellent project management, communication, interpersonal, analytical, and organizational skills
• Experience leading data operations powering CV/AI models, and/or experience in designing and running operations targeting the collection of human feedback
• A strong understanding of applied machine learning concepts
• Excellent communication skills; you are able to communicate with and facilitate communication betwe